>> jet that everybody wants.

That was the f22. And we blocked international sales in favor of the f35. The death of the f22 should not be mourned, we will get 6th gen research to replace it.

As for the everybody wants it bit, this is very true. Much to the ~~shargrin~~ chagrin of EU military industry. With one of our presidential candidates calling for us pulling out of nato, with us not backing Ukraine, I would expect that the f35 is the last major military product we sell in the EU this way. And for as much as I might not love it, that spending is a large part of our exports and economy.

F22's maintenance burden was vastly higher than the F35, which is still quite expensive.

Costs are also somewhat weirdly calculated, by just taking hours flown / cost. Maybe we could fly the jet a lot more for a modest increase in cost, & the numbers would look much better. But we don't fly that much, especially given the teething issues (such as the oxygen supply issues) we've had. There was a really great report I think based on GAO or maybe direct from GAO that covered f35 expenses very closely, comparing across services over time, that really was interesting to see; haven't found the link again though alas.

The F35 is also a far more advanced sensor & communication system, I believe. F22 was a more conventional stealth where the pilots got the mission, got on the air, & kept minimal emissions to the target & hopefully back; the f117 I think had similar characteristics. This isn't nearly as general purpose a role.

Even without the export ban, there was no real international demand for the F-22. The cost was so high that none of our close allies could even remotely afford it, especially after the end of the Cold War and prior to the rise of China as an expansionist global power. Back when F-22 production was terminated in 2009, everyone was cutting (or at least not increasing) military spending. If Japan or Australia had really pushed to buy the F-22 it would have been possible to produce an export model with the more sensitive items stripped out. They didn't want it.

shargrin?

Presumably meant chagrin.

chagrin /shə-grĭn′/

noun A keen feeling of mental unease, as of annoyance or embarrassment, caused by failure, disappointment, or a disconcerting event. "To her chagrin, the party ended just as she arrived." Vexation; mortification.

I do hope we don’t end up wishing we had pulled out of NATO.

how would that happen?

2024 election

getting pulled into a war that we can’t afford to fight and losing many American lives comes to mind

Isn't that like the whole point of NATO?

maybe if you’re a small European country

If someone invades some Eastern European country we get pulled into a war, even if there’s no indication that it would ever have involved the US otherwise.

> that spending is a large part of our exports and economy.

I'm seeing annual US exports at $2 trillion, with military exports at $56bn, or 2.8%. That is definitely material, but hard to call that "large part of"

Seems like victory through attrition. It might be the only modern fighter produced for export in the Western world.

The price is starting to look right, too. I'm still shocked by this.

Cost per flight hour is still much higher than its slightly less capable competitors.

I don't know what the argument is for that. Maybe that sim training will be a larger percentage of training in the future, and therefore operating costs don't matter so much? Take whatever jet has the best capabilities, period?

I think what that misses is that maintenance of real aircraft will atrophy without constant pilot feedback. Of course mechanics can follow the maintenance guidelines, but so much of that, historically, is guided, modified, and improved by experience from wear and tear from actual use.

> slightly less capable

What competitor is even close to "slightly less capable"?

The main driver of the cost is maintaining stealth coatings. On that front it has no real competitors.

I guess it depends on how much one values stealth. I'm just an armchair-most-things, but it seems to me that there are many situations stealth doesn't matter as much as effective robot range, turn-around time and ease of logistics.

If rumors are to be believed, without reflectors on, the F-35 should have a radar cross section smaller than a quarter (which is a bit larger than a 1 Euro coin). On top of that, its radar is purported to outrange Russian and Chinese radars by almost 2:1. Just looking at it for air supremacy missions, the thing is basically invisible (to radar), and can launch a missile at an enemy jet before they could even detect it, if it wasn't basically invisible.

I mean, even if it had a larger cross section it could probably pick off Russian fighters before those could do anything in return. But with the stealth it has, it could creep up on them and they wouldn't even know what happened until it was too late.

Aren’t the 6th gen European fighters likely going to be exported too? Granted that is not here and now.

The Korean Boramae is also likely to be exported. But there, granted it’s more a 4.5gen plane unless/until they iterate further.

Two different international coalitions are now trying to design 6th-generation fighters that will be available for export, but the earliest they could possibly be available is 2035. So, for at least another decade the F-35 will be the only survivable 5th-generation fighter available for purchase in US-aligned countries.

There are still a few other 4th-generation fighters in production, some with modernized systems, but at this point they're only suitable for a limited set of defensive or low-intensity missions. Russia and China supposedly also have operational 5th-generation fighters now but it's unclear whether those actually work, and they can't build enough to even supply their own forces let alone exports.

China has more than 200+ J-20s and growing. The J-31 is there too, but likely in smaller numbers for carriers?

Your point on how effective they really are or not is on point though. Ukraine has shown a lot of Russian wunderwaffe aircraft performing less than spectacularly.

I'm most interested in what the unit economics here are. Inefficiencies in Western manufacturing are seem like they could be significant since the big threat in the short term seems to be a WWI style blow up by UN security council countries.

The US is basically broke and seems to be struggling industrially. It won't be able to ignore economics if it has to conduct a war against an industrial power.

It’s always amazing to consider what people think about the economy vs how it’s actually doing.

Japan has a Debt to GDP ratio of 255%, relatively few natural resources, and a rapidly aging population, yet it is still doing reasonably well. America by comparison is in a vastly better position economically.

Japan is also a net creditor [0]. One of the largest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...

Being a net creator means foreign investors are less interested in investing inside your country than your own population is interested in investing outside of it. In many ways it’s advantageous, but also a sign something negative is going on.

So I'm seeing

> Japan has a Debt to GDP ratio of 255% ... yet it is still doing reasonably well

and

> Being a net creator ... [is] a sign something negative is going on.

How do you synthasize these? Would the Japanese be economically better off if they just forgave the debts of all the people who owe them money? That seems suspicious to me. As far as I can tell the argument is that the US is doing better than Japan, Japan is different to the US and therefore the US is not broke.

I don't think that is a strong argument. If the US engaged in heavy war spending, they'd have to print like madmen and don't think their economy would cope well. Let alone where they'd get the money to prepare for a conflict without focusing on manufacturing efficiency; it isn't easy to outspend people from this starting position because they seem to be finding the limit of what they can borrow. The people they owe money to aren't going to get it back in real terms either, seems safe to say.

Reasonably well doesn’t mean everything is great, just that the country is continuing to function. Japan’s GDP growth rate (total and per capita) has been terrible for years, but they are a long way from becoming a failed state.

In many ways Japan’s economy actually fits people’s perception of the US economy.

That's a stupid metric, I don't know why they keep bringing it up. Japan is a good debtor and it's probably cheap for them to finance their debts so they could end up paying less for them than a bad debtor would for a debt worth 50% of their GDP.

Money spent on the economy stimulates growth even if it comes from loans.

I'm not an economist but probably I would probably define the ideal amount of debt a country should have is when the amount of economic growth coming from the extra money is equalled by the costs of financing said debt.

> victory through attrition

Basically, but also looking like increasingly transient victory through attrition that's going to backfire on US alliance in long term.

TLDR - Convince western bloc to burden share development cost of joint program, burn partners by retaining near exclusive control over deployment and development. See drama that US has control over mission data files, that can only be generated at Eglin AFB, aka non US operators have essentially no sovereign control over their F35s. In the meantime, partners stuck on F35 platform because multi generational gamble commitment killed their own aero industry and there's no alternative short/medium term.

There's a reason almost every non-US F35 operator that can, is developing their own fighter, or partnering up in programs to to develop non US associated fighters (history US joint programs tech sharing drama entirely different shitshow) - actual long term operators of F35 have come to realize getting captured by F35 US/Lockmart SAAS is highly problematic. Borderline treasonous if we're being honest.

US can probably fix this by openning up program, or wait for other programs to fail technically/economically. Seeing how US can barely wrest F35 from Lockheed contracts, and how behind other western programs are, the latter probably more likely.

EDIT: Sorry - The article was about it took 17 YEARS to work out all these bugs...

So - it reminded me of the thought of the 737max bugs that boeing is plagued with right now...

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I'm really curious to know how much of all these billions we are sending out to all these wars will come back to this project?

Also, in a general aviation sense, I think all planes should have a link to their service records.

I think that service records should be required to be made public for ALL large transit modals; sea, air, rail, etc.

A restaurant has to publicly post their health score.

Thoughts

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I just thought of: there should be public data sets from the FAA with all service records for all licensed commercial aircraft - and an llm fine tuned to produce ratings and spot errors.

This I think would be an epic(ly) hard thing to do, however the current Boeing Catastrophuk ESP with the 'suicide' of the Whistleblower would be good leverage to force this law.

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Actually I asked BING to GPTify this thought more succinctly, and got a pretty pretty pretty good response:

For Boeing’s crash data over the last 40 years, I can provide a general overview. However, specific annual data might not be readily available in a single source.

Here’s what I found:

Here is every Boeing Safety event Since 1970 on the NTSB site

https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/ResultsV2.aspx?queryId=d6cc0483-0...

Boeing 737 Accidents: As of February 2024, there have been a total of 529 aviation accidents involving all 737 aircraft [0]

Boeing’s Annual Summary: Provides insights into the safety of commercial air travel worldwide, including accident statistics [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

[1] https://www.boeing.com/content/dam/boeing/boeingdotcom/compa...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boeing-whistleblower-john-bar...

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> service records should be required to be made public

We’re still talking about military aircraft?

Tax money spent on it. Does it effectively make every every taxpayer citizen a shareholder? Shareholders deserve to know project spending and efficiency.

> Shareholders deserve to know project spending and efficiency

One, shareholding is a bad analogy for democracy.

Two, shareholders—and voters in a republic—delegate responsibility, including the responsibility to protect secrets. Our spooks would kill for China or Russia’s air force service records, and for good reason: it lets you exploit patterns and limitations.

> shareholders—and voters in a republic—delegate responsibility

How about accounability of those who manage?

> shareholding is a bad analogy for democracy.

Why?

vote => no accountability smells bad. As leads to misfeasance.

Was the money spent on the Sprint rocket interceptor spent well?

Yeah, that came across to me as weird take as well. Like they have a point they really want to make, but just comes across very tone deaf to the actual conversation at hand (if not just missed/ignored).

I was reading service records as what conflicts it had been in, and what it's record was during those conflicts. It took a second that they were conflating this like it was a Boeing passenger plane type of thing. oy vey! There might have been a big whooshing sound as the point flew.

EDIT: Sorry - The article was about it took 17 YEARS to work out all these bugs...

So - it reminded me of the thought of the 737max bugs that boeing is plagued with right now...

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Well, I just looked up every boeing safety event on NTSB since 1970:

https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/ResultsV2.aspx?queryId=d6cc0483-0...

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But thats for commercial...

Im going to dig into this more and make a separate post in r/aviation..

> all these billions we are sending out to all these wars

We are sending these billions to domestic defence industry, that will sending older equipment to various wars, and we are keeping the newer stuff